


A Doctor and an Engineer Walk Onto a Starship

by owlinaminor



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: 50 themes challenge, Angst, Drabbles, Fluff, Friendship, M/M, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 14:29:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Well, one strides angrily, and one beams into a turbine tank, but they get there, and they find each other.  Fifty themes of Scones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Doctor and an Engineer Walk Onto a Starship

**Author's Note:**

> These were originally posted separately as individual drabbles on my Scones Tumblr: http://docmccoyandmrscott.tumblr.com/ Now, at long last, they have been put together and edited, for your reading pleasure.
> 
> This story -- the story of how Leonard McCoy and Montgomery Scott meet, become friends, and fall in love -- is my convoluted headcanon, and I fully expect to write more stories based off of it. (Not in the near future or anything, but, you know, at some point. Because this pairing demands more fic, and if I have to provide that singlehandedly, I will.)
> 
> So, anyway, enjoy. :)

**1\. Introduction**

"Towel!  I need a towel!"

There is a strange man in the med bay, and Leonard McCoy is not amused.

"Who are you, what are you doing here, and why the hell do you think you’re authorized to take my towels?" he fires off in quick succession, raised eyebrow at the ready.

The man stops suddenly, as though just now coming to terms with his less-than-admirable manners.  "Oh, ah, hello," he says, with an impressively thick Scottish accent and a little wave Leo can’t help find endearing (endearing?  He just met this guy, shit.)  "M’name’s Scotty, I beamed aboard with Kirk, mis-aimed a little and landed in one of the turbine tubes, nearly drowned, harrowing experience, now please is a towel really that much to ask?  This is a med bay, you must have ‘em somewhere, right?"

In a moment, Leo will ask how this Scotty person managed to beam aboard a ship traveling at warp speed, what the hell he meant by “with Kirk," and why he hasn’t been caught and punished yet. But, for right now, he goes to the back and locates a towel, because honestly, he couldn’t just leave the man standing there all soggy and miserable, could he?

"I’m Doctor McCoy, by the way," he throws over his shoulder as he searches for through the closet, “Leonard McCoy."

"Thanks for the hospitality, Doc," Scotty replies, making himself at home on a cot (and definitely not checking out the good doctor’s arse.)

-~-

**2\. Rain**

"Hey, Leo, what do you miss?" Monty asks one night, as they lie in bed curled around each other, everything louder and more real in the dark.  "From Earth, I mean."

"Proper food," the doctor says after a moment of thought, “not this synthesized shit.  New clothes.  People — free people, strangers, that I’m not responsible for.  Oh, and rain."

"Rain, really?" Monty wonders, surprised.  He took Leonard as the type to bitch and moan about any weather that wasn’t sunny and warm.

"Yeah, rain," Leo repeats, almost defensive.  "The kind that comes down in sheets, soaks you to the core, washes everything clean again … I hate the climate control on these starships.  No rainy spring, no snowy winter, no windy autumn, not hot summer, no nothing.  Just perfect weather, all of the time — and perfect gets boring, you know?"

"Yeah," Monty agrees quietly, thinking.

And then, a few days later, Leonard hears of a disturbance in the turbine room, rushes (no, walks, calmly walks) over there to find a pipe with suspiciously placed leaks dumping cold water everywhere.

Monty’s laughing, not caring that his hair is being plastered to his head or that he’ll get in such big trouble for this, so of course, Leo has to kiss him.  If only to shut him up.

_(Aw, who is he kidding?)_

-~-

**3\. "Do I Know You?"**

They all gather at a bar their first night back, to celebrate home and each other and the sheer ecstasy of being alive.  At first, there’s laughing and joking and reminiscing — a cheerful retelling of the funnier parts of their story, because nobody wants to talk about the bad shit.  A few drinks in, Jim leans into Spock’s shoulder, practically cackling as Sulu attempts to imitate Chekov’s enthusiastic “I can do zat!"  Jim’s face is open and joyful in a way Leonard has never before seen, and Spock gazes down at him — fondly, gently (as though he doesn’t think he should be having these feelings, but, for some reason, can’t bring himself to care.)

Leonard tries not to watch, but it’s hard, so hard, when all he has for company is a tall glass of whiskey.

"They’ll go home t’gether at the end of the night, doncha think?" someone slurs, tipsy and Scottish, on the stool next to Leonard.

"Do I know you?" the doctor retorts, his mind suddenly overflowing with the images he’d managed to stave off until now.

The other man visibly deflates, wondering what he did wrong.  "Um.  Scotty.  I needed a —"

"Towel, right," Leonard cuts in, cheering up a little with the memory of how Scotty’s hair has spiked up when he toweled if off and how the man had lurked in the med bay for an hour afterwards, rambling about the most random things.  "So, where’d you come from, anyway?  You never really explained."

"Somewhere cold, laddie," Scotty says vehemently.  "Somewhere cold and terrible, with no sandwiches at all."

The two men find they share a common love of hard liquor, sarcasm, and funny stories, so hours have passed before Leonard realizes that Jim and Spock left (together) a long time ago.  The thought doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would.

"Hey, Scotty, need a place to stay the night?  Looks like my dorm room’s got an extra bed now."

 _Do I know you?_ the doctor wonders again, later, seeing this strange little man called Scotty on Jim’s abandoned bunk — and then quickly realizes the stupidity of his question.

Montgomery Scott sleeps curled up, taking up half as much space as he could, and clutches the pillow tightly, mumbling something incomprehensible in that thick brogue of his.

Leo is a doctor, yes, and he has reverence for life, but this wave of protectiveness washing over him is … It’s something else.

-~-

**4\. Cards**

"Wanna play cards?" Leonard asks, halfway through Monty’s explanation of how some new engine part he just received makes his life more complicated (because “they just don’t make ‘em like they used to," apparently.)

"Cards?" Monty repeats, thrown off the track of his rant.

"Yeah," Leonard says.  "I’m not classy like Jim and the green-blooded devil — I’m shit at chess.  But I can play poker."

Monty considers the idea for a moment, then decides, “Only if we make it strip poker."

Leonard stares at him, and for one brief second Monty is worried — he’s always afraid that, one day, he’ll go to far, and one little misstep will scare away the one person he wants most in the world — but then Leo bursts out laughing, loud and guffawing, not the prettiest laughter but goddamn is it the brightest.

"If you wanted to get my clothes off, Monty," he chokes out, Southern accent thick and beautiful the way it always is when he loses control, “all you had to do was ask."

Monty grins, reaches, presses a kiss to Leo’s neck, feels a laugh echo through his throat.

They do play poker, later — naked and glowing, with sheets strewn about like forgotten troubles.  If you ask them about it tomorrow, neither man will be able to say who won.

_(Both, both of them.)_

-~-

**5\. Lost and Found**

Monty finds him in the med bay, curled up in a corner, long after his shift is supposed to be over.

"Bones?  Bones, the captain wants you."

No response.

"Leonard!"

As Monty approaches further, he notices a flask of what could only be whiskey in the doctor’s hands.  He’s quivering, a lost puppy so scared to be away from home.

"What is it, Doc?" Monty asks, sitting down beside him and placing a tentative arm on his shoulders.

Leonard looks up, as though just now realizing Monty’s presence, then sighs, broken, and hides his face in his knees.

"It’s Joanna’s birthday today," he says, voice muted, syllables tied together.

Monty doesn’t know what to do, except listen.  He doesn’t remove the arm.

"She’s ten, now," Leonard continues, “a whole decade.  Double digits.  She’s so excited.  She’s having a big party, with all of her friends, balloons, presents, cake … the works.  And she said all she wanted was for her daddy to be there."

Oh, hell.  Loneliness, that’s what this is.  Loneliness, guilt, and pain.  Monty has never had kids, but those feelings are old friends.

"Ten years of her life, and I’ve been there for … how much of it?  Too little to count.  She just wants me to be there, and I want to be there, but I can’t, because … why?  Because I have to stay on this fucking starship, and fucking look after everyone.  I have to be a mother to everyone here, practically, fixing all of your little cuts and scrapes and bruises, but I can’t be her father.  I don’t save the universe like Jim does, I just stay back and yell at him to take care of himself, which he won’t do anyway, so what’s the point.  What’s the _point_?" Leonard yells, his voice breaking.

Monty’s stood up to admirals, survived blizzards, but he has his limits.  And Leo feeling guilty for not being there for his daughter on her birthday is one thing (understandable, curable with copious amounts of alcohol), but Leo feeling useless is another.

"Bones," he says firmly, trying to get the doctor to look up at him.  "Doctor.  McCoy."  None of it is any use.

“Leonard," Monty finally shouts — and nobody ever calls Leo by his first name, so that’s enough to get his attention.

"You — of all the people on this great bloody ship, you — are not useless.  You keep us sane.  You remind the captain that he’s human, that he can’t do everything.  You remind Spock that it’s okay to have emotions.  You remind Chekov that he’s only seventeen and its okay to make mistakes.  You remind Sulu that he doesn’t have to be working or studying all the time to be successful.  You remind Uhura that being a woman like her on a ship full of men is something to be proud of."

 _You remind me that I’m someone worth talking to, and not just for my transwarp equations_ , he thinks, but doesn’t say, because Leo is already looking at him with this mixture of surprise and awe and he can’t take much more.

"The point is," Monty says, "the point is that you have saved the lives of everyone on this ship a thousand times.  You don’t do the actual universe-saving, sure, but you make it possible for that to happen.  You’re the bones, and without the bones, there’s nothing."

Monty stands, and offers a hand to the best doctor any starship could ask for.  "Come on.  I’ll make us sandwiches."

Leo stares at it, as though unsure whether or not it’s real, and for a moment Monty’s scared he said too much, gave something away —

And then Monty finds himself engulfed in a hug, and all of those doubts go away.  He’s an engineer, trained to fix machines, but sometimes, he can fix people, too.

"Thank you."

"Any time."

-~-

**6\. Kings, Queens, and Jokers**

Sometimes, life on the starship Enterprise feels like one massive card game.  Most crew members are just simple numbers: good at what they do, but unassuming, fading into the background, unimportant in the grand scheme of things.  A couple — Chekov and Sulu, for example — are aces: rare and unique, either the highest or the lowest, depending on the game.

Then, there’s the royal court.  Kirk and Spock are kings: ruling the ship with raised eyebrows and devilish grins, coming up with the genius plans that will save them all.  Uhura is a queen: a warrior, strong and fierce, not afraid to kick ass.  McCoy is a jack: not the best or the brightest, but the glue, keeping the deck together with sassy comments and an army of hypos — and you could win a game, if you started with just him.

Scotty, though … Scotty’s just a joker.  They need him, sure, but only when something goes wrong, or when they need a laugh.  He lives in the bowels of the ship, hardly ever even seeing the bridge.

He isn’t close to the royal court, not at all.

But the court is always playing, always changing — Spock and Uhura, Sulu and Chekov, Spock and Kirk, McCoy off to the side, draining the stores of whiskey to pretend he doesn’t care — and Scotty starts to wonder.

The king takes the queen, and the jack is cast aside.  Aces are low, numbers are useless, jokers are ignored.  Isn’t how the game is supposed to go?

But sometimes, the rules can be changed.  Enterprise has two kings, crowns shining all the brighter for their invisibility.  The queen is strong and sure, in need of no king to guide her.  Aces are high, brilliant, exuberant.  Every number is important, in its own, small way.

And jacks … Well, maybe the joker isn’t so far from the royal court after all.

-~-

**7\. Running Away**

"Shore leeeeaaaave!" Monty hoots, beaming down onto the planet with an excited fist-pump.

"Are you three?  Really?" Leo asks, equal parts irritated and amazed.

"Aw, come on, Leo, try and tell me you aren’t excited," Monty retorts.  "This is our first day off in, what, eight months?  And look at this place!"

Leo looks, and he has to admit that the planet is something, with the skyscrapers, glittering like diamonds, reaching up into the deep purple sky, outstretched arms grabbing at the vast expanse of stars.  This planet is an immense, bustling metropolis, third biggest city in the galaxy, and Kirk’s given his crew the whole night to explore, only asking that they don’t stray too far or get too seriously injured (in which case, Leo will kill someone.)  The possibilities are limitless.

"Come on, don’t stand there gaping all day," Leo says, grabbing Monty’s hand and pulling him down the street.

They aren’t an unusual couple here, just two guys in jeans and T-shirts on a little vacation, and it’s such a relief — no missions, no responsibilities, no worries.  Monty watches Leo’s face sometimes and wishes he’d always look like this, without the wrinkles and the frowns.  Leo watches how Monty gets so excited about the tiniest things — a sandwich, the glimpse of a rare alien, a particular shade of blue — and mocks him for it, but secretly, wishes he’ll never lose that reverence.

And then, they’re staggering out of a bar, holding each other up and laughing like lunatics, and Monty stops for a second, says, almost like an afterthought, “Run away with me, Leo."

Time stops, but around them, the world keeps turning.  Funny how that can happen.

"What?" Leo asks, despite the fact that he knows exactly what was said.

"We could do it," Monty insists, suddenly pleading.  "We could disappear.  No more spaceships, no more saving the world, just … us."

It might be the alcohol, it might be the light in Monty’s eyes, but Leo actually considers it for a moment.  But then, he thinks of Jim’s face, the faces of everyone else aboard that ship.

He shakes his head.  "They need us too much."

Monty presses his face into Leo’s shoulder, warm and close and worth it.  "I know," he whispers, almost inaudible, “but I had to ask."

"But," Leonard says slowly, a mischievous smirk spreading across his face, “you know what we _can_ do …"

The crew doesn’t find them until a week later, ensconced in a tiny, cheap hotel room with no weapons or identification, just each other.

"You weren’t trying to run away from us, were you?" Jim asks, so nervous beneath his bravado.

"What?  You mean it’s been more than a couple of hours since we got off the ship?" Monty jokes, eyes too wide and innocent.

Jim laughs, Spock raises a disapproving eyebrow, Leo roles his eyes — but then he catches Monty’s gaze for a second and gives him a grin, and — everything’s okay.

Better than okay.

-~-

**8\. Breaking the Rules**

"I’m pretty sure we’re not allowed to do this," Leo gasps, arching his back against the hard leather of the chair.

Monty looks up from paying homage to the good doctor’s excellent neck to glare at him.  "What, don’t you think the Captain and Spock do this all the time?"

"Yes, that’s —" Monty’s moved on to Leo’s chest now, lifting up his shirt to playfully tug at a nipple.  "That’s exactly why."

"Aw, what’s a little rule-breaking between friends?" Monty replies, licking his way down to Leo’s hips.  "Besides, I haven’t seen you in ages."

"You had — fix engines."  Leo’s sentences are getting less and less coherent with every passing moment.  "I had — Joanna —"

"Oh, yes, how is she?" Monty asks, conversationally, undoing buttons and sliding down pants.

"Fine, she’s — oh, God, Monty …"

And Monty jumps up into the chair to seize Leo’s lips in his own, because, well, the sound of Leo calling out his name like that, rough and raw and wanting … There’s no alternative.

-

"Oh, by the way, Captain … the doctor and I really enjoyed that chair of yours, if you know what I mean …"

"You _what_?!" 

-~-

**9\. Library**

So they’re on New Vulcan, because Spock is speaking at some important science conference or something and the rest of the crew is there for moral support.  It turns out to be pretty interesting, with panels and lectures on the most recent innovations in all subjects, but conferences (especially those run by Vulcans) can quickly get boring.

That’s when Monty discovers the library.

It’s New Vulcan’s most precious cultural treasure, partially because it contains centuries-old texts from the beginning of recorded Vulcan history and partially because ninety-nine percent of those texts have been synthesized, word-for-word, based upon the memories of surviving Vulcans.  Non-Vulcans are rarely allowed in, and when they are, they must be completely silent.  As in, whisper and you will be brutally murdered, silent.

Monty takes this as a challenge.  Leonard finds it to be a very worthy one.

They sneak in through a back door (Monty’s hacking skills do come in handy sometimes), find a corner behind a couple of particularly ancient-looking bookshelves, and begin.

It’s a pretty close thing, but they’re successful.  They are trained professionals, after all.

And then, since there’s no point in getting away with something if you don’t tell anyone about it, they leave a note: “On this spot, Stardate 1074.98, Lieutenant Commanders Leonard McCoy and Montgomery Scott of the USS Enterprise engaged in coitus.  It was most enjoyable."

Both men are exiled from New Vulcan, and Spock doesn’t speak to either of them for a month, but it was most enjoyable, so.

-~-

**10\. Silence**

It is silent in the med bay.

The nurses have learned, over time, to identify Doctor McCoy’s precise mood based upon his workplace behavior — yelling and swearing is normal, smashing things is pissed off, bumping into things is decaffeinated, and so on — but never before have they encountered this.  The doctor treats his patients, files his reports, but briskly, roughly, without ever looking anyone in the eye.  The nurses don’t know where his mind is, but they’re sure it isn’t in the med bay.

_"What’s your problem, Leonard McCoy?  What’s your diagnosis, doc?"_

The nurses tiptoe around McCoy like mourners at a wake; they only speak when absolutely necessary, try to pretend they don’t exist.  The cheerful banter that usually defines the med bay is gone, wiped out, like the range of expression on its CMO’s face.

_"Oh, don’t tell me, I know — you’re in love with the captain, aren’t you?"_

The nurses know about McCoy and Scotty — have known for a long time, ever since the doctor started disappearing to engineering as soon as his shift was over and yelling at Scotty about minor injuries more than he yelled at his normal patients, maybe even more than he yelled at the captain.  They didn’t say anything to McCoy, but whispered among themselves, giggled when Scotty would come into the med bay grinning and say something in his unintelligible Scottish drawl to make the doctor blush.

_"And instead of saving yourself with hyposprays or some other fancy medical mumbo-jumbo, you got me.  Well, congrats, doc, the operation was successful — at least, for a bit."_

The nurses have seen them argue before, of course — what couple doesn’t argue, especially when it’s made up of a proud Southerner and a high-strung Scot?  But those arguments were always about stupid, inconsequential things — what they should name the tribble, or how Scotty had managed to bang his head in the same place for the fifth time that week — and had always ended in laughter and (the nurses suspected) making out behind closed doors.  This … this is different.

_"Sorry, Leo, but I can’t take it anymore.  I don’t want to be just a replacement.  Your procedure’s flawed."_

-~-

**11\. Dead Wrong**

Monty hears a knock on the door to his chambers.

He opens the door and — of course it’s Leonard, visibly drooping as though the head-strung, not-having-any-of-your-shit doctor has been sucked out of him, leaving just a shell behind.  Monty told himself that he wouldn’t forgive Leonard, was so determined not to, but it’s hard, especially when the man is carrying a bottle of the ship’s best scotch (hidden away in their secret alcohol stash until now) and are those …

"Where’d you get flowers around here?" Monty asks.  (And immediately berates himself for not slamming the door shut.  _Stupid, stupid, stupid_ …)

"Oh, these?"  Leonard looks at the bouquet of roses and hyacinths, with a couple of sunflowers (sunflowers, really?) scattered among them as though just remembering its presence, then returns to examining his fascinating uniform shoes.  "I bought ‘em from Sulu."

"Sulu?"  _Where’s your resolve, man?  Stop asking him about bloody flowers and just let him know that it’s over.  What are you, a girl?_

"Yeah, he’s a botanist, didn’t you know …?"

Leo looks Monty in the eyes (finally), glaring resolve from the man who joined Starfleet despite his fear of space and became the chief medical officer of the flagship.  And, well, okay, there’s no way Monty can close the door on him now.

"That’s not the point, though," Leo says, firm and determined, a doctor giving a painful diagnosis.  "The point is that you are dead wrong, Mr. Montgomery Scott.  Wrong about me, and wrong about yourself."

Monty opens his mouth to contradict, but Leo doesn’t let him, the jerk.  "You’re wrong about yourself, because you don’t believe you’re the best person on this ship.  You stay here and look after the Enterprise, even though you could probably be successful at a much better job.  You’ve saved everyone on this goddamned ship more than anyone else, even the captain.  You’re brilliant, and you notice things, and you fix things — fix more than just engines."

Monty knows he’s probably flushed bright red, because this is the most anyone’s ever complimented him at one time, but Leo just keeps going.

"And you’re wrong about me, because I don’t think you’re just a replacement.  Sure, I love Jim, always will — but he’s not you.  Not even close.  Even if he wasn’t Vulcan-mind-married or whatever they call that shit to the green-blooded hobgoblin, I would still pick you over him.  Because, yeah, he’s special, but you’re special, in a different way — a better way, if you ask me.  And I’m not very eloquent with, like, flowery metaphors or anything, so I’m just gonna say … Monty, don’t leave me.  Please.  Because I need you, I — I love you, and I think my nurses are gonna kill me if I mope around the med bay one day longer."

Monty’s been staring, with this awe reminiscent of the first time he saw the Enterprise’s engines, the whole time Leo was talking, but with that last sentence, a slow grin comes across his face, like the first drops of rain after a long drought.

"Yes.  I — I mean, me, too.  I mean —"

"I know what you mean, Monty."

The next day, Leo comes into the med bay ranting about the poor quality of synthesizer coffee, and there’s a vase of flowers in a place of honor on the engineering deck.

-~-

**12\. Shadow**

Montgomery Scott has always been sort-of a shadow.

When he was little, he’d lurk in the doorway of his older sister’s room, solving the complex math and physics problems she struggled over as easily as other kids his age figured two plus two. 

He never boasted, though — never told anyone how smart he was, for fear of being teased or, worse, not believed at all.  It didn’t matter, anyway.  Monty didn’t need the admiration of others, not when he could sit up in his room for hours on end, figuring out how to take technology apart and put it back together, better than it had been before.  The joy of building something that worked was all that mattered.

Monty stayed a shadow throughout his school years, rarely speaking up in class; he simply astounded his teachers by quietly doing minimal homework and getting optimal grades.  He never argued with anyone unless it was truly important.

And the one time it was truly important, he got exiled to this Starfleet outpost on this ice planet in the middle of bloody nowhere, so he figured he’d made a mistake, and went back to what he was good at: doing his job as best he could, without attracting much notice.

Staying in the shadows.

So Monty doesn’t mind when he gets no medal for saving the Enterprise.  He doesn’t complain when the captain really only speaks to him if something goes wrong.  He’s okay with his job as chief engineer on a starship, despite the fact that his brilliance could probably earn him a much better position as a galaxy-renowned physicist or engineer.

Because he gets to look after the Enterprise, the best ship in the universe.  And he gets to look after the people inside it, who mean more to him than he’d ever admit.

Especially one gruff-tempered, soft-hearted doctor who’s been coming to visit Monty more and more in recent months.  A doctor who is currently sitting on Monty’s bed, drinking his best liquor, and attempting to use the light from one of Monty’s headlamps (useful for making repairs in tight spaces) to make shadow puppets on the walls.

Leonard laughs, shaping his hands to create illusions of a dog, a frog, a soaring eagle ("This one could be wrong, though, since Jim taught it to me — more likely it means, ‘Fuck me hard and fast’ in some alien dialect.") on the wall.

Monty applauds, makes the occasional suggestion — and wishes, for the first time in years, that he could bring himself to step out of the shadows, just a little.

Leonard doesn’t notice the heart forming on the wall behind his head.

-~-

**13\. "Are You Challenging Me?"**

The night before their first long voyage, the crew of the Enterprise gets together at a bar, to, as the ship’s chief medical officer so eloquently puts it, “consume such large quantities of alcohol that I forget I’m going to have to spend five years in space with you idiots."  At this particular bar, the bartenders all shy away from Monty as though he’s a lion in the midst of a herd of antelope.

"What did you do?" Leonard asks, not accusing so much as curious.

Monty grins proudly.  "Totally decimated their store of scotch the last time I was here."

Leo laughs.  "Yes, because a typical bar in San Francisco carries so much Scottish liquor, that’s such an accomplishment."

"I could drink more if I wanted!" Monty retorts.  "I’m the heaviest drinker on the Enterprise, everyone knows that."

Leo looks as though he just ran, face-first, into a pole.  "No way."

"Yes way."

"If anyone’s the heaviest drinker on the Enterprise, it’s me!"

Monty stands up, slaps his hands on the table like an angry walrus. “Are you challenging me?!"

Leo stands, too, and waves a determined finger in Monty’s face.  "Hell yeah I am."

"Alright, then," Monty says.

They shake hands, then call the bartenders to prepare all of the scotch and whiskey they have (Monty’s favorite scotch and Leo’s favorite bourbon are both about ninety proof, so it’s fair.)  The rest of the crew gathers around to watch this supreme battle of men.

They’re on their third shots when a voice pipes up from the back of the crowd: “Wait!  I can do zat!"

It’s partially that Chekov is the youngest member of the crew and desperate to prove himself, and mostly that he’s Russian and Russians never pass up a drinking contest if they can help it.

"Well, you’ve gotta take three shots first, okay, kid?" Leo says gruffly, when Chekov asks if he can join (all polite with Bambi eyes on full throttle, which really isn’t fair.)

"Okay," Chekov agrees readily — and shocks pretty much everyone by downing three shots of hard, Finnish vodka in as many seconds.

Monty and Leo wake up a few hours later, groaning pathetically like beached whales, unwilling to move a centimeter (much less fly off into space) to find that Russian whiz kid still sitting at the bar, averaging a shot of vodka every two minutes.

He grins at them, a little loose but not even close to falling over.  " Доброе утро!  Я победил, да?  Вам нужно лекарство, для ваших голов?” *****

Neither of them knows what that means, but they’re pretty sure it’s an insult.  They carry each other to the launch, Leonard glaring at anyone who so much as thinks about commenting on their inebriated state.

Nobody on the ship ever thinks about letting Chekov into a drinking contest ever again, and the two resident alcoholics fall asleep on top of each other in the med bay.

-~-

**14\. No Way Out**

Two days after they officially started dating, Monty shows up in the med bay with his eyebrows almost completely singed off in a minor engine explosion.

Leonard goes off on him, of course — “you should’ve been more careful" and “you’re always doing stupid shit like this, you never learn" and “you’re setting a terrible example for your ensigns" and “you look ridiculous without eyebrows" and a thousand other things, but Monty isn’t listening, not really.  He’s too busy watching Leonard as he paces around the med bay, grabbing bandages and records and the ever-present hyposprays — he never stops moving, that doctor, as though if he pauses for one second, he’ll fall apart.  But his eyes, when Monty catches a glimpse of them, are twinkling, with the laughter he’s just barely holding in.

And Monty can’t help feeling honored, strangely enough — honored that he’s receiving one of those classic Doctor McCoy lectures, usually reserved for the captain, that mean Leonard cares.

"— can’t believe they let you be in charge of anything, you clumsy oaf," Leonard is saying, leaning in to dab ointment on Monty’s burned face, his touch soft and careful.

Monty captures one of the doctor’s hands, presses it to his lips.  "I know I’m clumsy, sure, but you’re stuck with me," he whispers into the palm.  "There’s no way out."

Leo smiles at him for the slightest moment before whirling off to grab something else, and it heals Monty more than any medicine.

_"Never wanted one."_

-~-

**15\. Dreams**

Nobody who has lived and worked on a starship for an extended period of time wants to sleep alone.

It’s more than the desire for companionship that plagues every human being — it’s because of the dreams.  Because when you wake up, sweating and shaking, sometimes screaming, it’s so much harder if you’re all alone, so much easier if there are warm hands to caress you, warm arms to surround you, a warm voice to lie and say that it’s all going to be okay.  Starships are dangerous places, and crewmembers aren’t supposed to pair up but they do, because they need each other to lean on.

Monty has dreams about his ship.  He imagines that he abandoned her again, but wasn’t in time to save her; in his mind, she crashes onto a barren planet, or wastes slowly away from lack of fuel, or explodes into a million pieces.  After one of those dreams, Leonard always awakes to find the engineer sitting in a corner of the bed, cross-legged and small and silent, making adjustment after adjustment on his PADD.  Sometimes, Leonard can coax him to go back to sleep with words or kisses, but more often, they get up and go to engineering, and Monty checks everything, runs his hands over his ship, whispers to her that he’d do anything — anything — to keep her safe.

Leonard’s dreams are worse, though, because he dreams not of machines, but of people.  It’s never enough, in his dreams — neither his hyposprays nor his operations nor his sheer force of will — and there’s always a cot, at the end.  (Cots are beds with the warmth and comfort sucked out.)  It’s often Jim, after the Khan mess, but it could be anyone on the ship — Chekov, Uhura, Sulu, Monty — and Monty will awake to find that he’s being squeezed too tightly, like a young child’s security blanket.  He never wriggles out of the embrace, though; instead, he pulls it tighter, murmurs to Leonard that he’s the best doctor in the universe, and none of them are going to die on his watch.

They don’t talk about the bad dreams, because some things raised in darkness are best left there, but they do talk about the good ones.  Bad dreams can be shared because the sharing takes away the pain, but good dreams should be shared because it makes them seem more real.

And one day, Leonard is going to live quietly in the countryside somewhere, with lots of alcohol and nobody to worry about, and Monty is going to run the best pub Scotland has ever seen, because they deserve it.

-~-

**16\. Out Cold****

Jim calls Leonard during the middle of his break, sounding equal parts furious and amused (which is, well, the only thing worse to hear from Jim would be excited).  "You better get down here quick, and bring a couple of nurses with you."

Leo bitches and moans about having to cut short his one break all day, but runs over to the transporter room when he remembers that the space station Jim’s calling from is the same one Monty was stationed on, watching Klingon ambassadors.  He tells himself not to imagine the worst, but he can’t help the way everything seems to stop when he finds Monty on the floor of the room, knocked out cold.

Of course, the idiot’s fine, just one black eye, only a little concussed — but still.  Still.

"Why do you have to do this to me, you prick," Leo mutters, checking Monty for more serious damage later in the med bay, after the more pressing injuries have been dealt with.  "I hate seeing you injure yourself every single goddamn day.  I mean, I like seeing you — but don’t try to get me to say that when you’re awake, ‘cause I won’t — but I prefer it when it’s just ‘cause you want to see me, not ‘cause you singed off your eyebrows or tripped over a loose wire or whatever your clumsy shithead mistake of the day is."

Leonard has other patients to check — goddamned Klingons and their goddamned hard skulls — but he finds himself lingering, watching the slow rise and fall of the engineer’s chest.

"I worry about you, Monty.  You’re so goddamn careless, and someday, it’s gonna get you killed, and I won’t be able to save you, and I don’t know … whoever started that fight with the Klingons, I’m gonna find him and punch him in the face, for spoiling my nice, relaxing afternoon."

Monty’s eyes flicker open, and he grins.  "It was me," he says.  "Wanna give me a second black eye, to match this one?"

"It was — you what — you heard what I was saying —"

"They insulted the Enterprise, called it garbage," the engineer explains.  "I had to do something, didn’t I?  And, um," he adds, looking down at his lap almost nervously, “I did hear, and I’ll … try to be more careful.  In the future.  Um."

Leo leans in and gives him a quick kiss.

"No, you won’t," he says gruffly — but Monty speaks cantankerous old doctor by now, so he knows what that really means.

-~-

**17\. Horror**

What is a ship without its captain?

A planet without a sun, an orchestra without a conductor, a group of children without a mother — orphans, who need to grow up too fast.

Scotty is the first one to find him.  He blinks into consciousness slowly, then suddenly jumps up with the conviction that something is horribly wrong.

He’ll beat himself up later, ask himself if there wasn’t something he could’ve done.  If he could’ve thought faster, woken up earlier, found some way to let Jim out before …

Right now, though, he just stares in horror at this fearless man he always looked up to, crumpled on the floor like a used tissue.

"Captain," he says, hoarse and shaking.

Jim closes his eyes, whispers, “Sorry," against the glass.

Scotty can’t announce this to the whole ship.  He’ll break down before he gets out a sentence.  But a couple of people need to see this.

He calls Spock first, because Spock is Jim’s better half, and will have to be captain without him.

Then, after Spock has sunk to his knees on the hard metal floor (and Scotty shouldn’t watch this, can’t watch this), he calls Jim’s best friend.

"Leo, you … I … I’m sorry."

The rest of the bridge crew find their way down soon enough, followed by more and more members of the Enterprise family, until so many are watching, unable to believe their eyes.  It’s so quiet, and the Enterprise is never quiet.

 _He’s just joking, right?_ they think.  _He’ll jump up in a second, laugh at us for being so scared.  McCoy will yell at him, Spock will sigh in exasperation, but everything will be fine._

Spock yells in rage, so illogical it’s frightening.

Leonard is still.  This man, always working, always talking, always thinking, always moving, is still.  They’ve all lost something today, but Leo … He looks as though he’s lost everything.

And that’s what scares Scotty more than anything, because Leo doesn’t live for himself, never has.

(No amount of alcohol can fix this, and Scotty’s desperate, but he doesn’t know what to do.)

-~-

**18\. Nature's Fury**

It was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance mission.  Spock and his ensigns would collect data about the planet’s potential for intelligent life, while Leonard and his nurses would determine whether the rumors were true, and a plant growing on the planet’s surface truly could swiftly rehabilitate nicotine addicts.

Of course, sometimes the captain forgets seemingly meaningless but actually quite important things.  Like checking the weather.

It’s been a week since the blizzard hit, and Monty is starting to get seriously anxious.  The communicators have been out since day two, frozen or cracked or just plain given up, and the landing party only had enough food for three days.  Transporting is impossible, with all of the heavy snow blocking any signals, so all the Enterprise can do is wait and hope.

According to their sensors, the temperature has dropped below negative forty degrees Celsius, and as for how long the snow should last … They have only estimates, none of them pretty.

Monty has nightmares about finding Leo frozen in a snowbank somewhere, his arms huddled around his body for a last refuge of warmth, a layer of ice coating his face — grim and determined, even to the last.  The engineer wonders what he ever could have done to nature to anger her so thoroughly, that she’d try to take away his doctor from him.

The captain comes down to engineering, sometimes, and he and Monty work tirelessly on the transporter, trying anything they can think of to get a signal.  Jim hasn’t slept since the storm started, and he doesn’t speak, doesn’t smile, doesn’t eat.

Monty has resented Jim before, for not realizing what he had and throwing it away, but he can’t hate him, especially not now, not when they’re both so similar — so desperate.

And then, the next day, Chekov (bless that Russian whiz kid to infinity and back) locks onto a signal, half a mile below ground.  Monty sprints to the transporter room, breaks down the door, stares.

There’s a layer of frost on his body two inches deep, and he’s yelling at Jim about something or other, but he’s there, he’s alive.  Something in Monty releases, flattens out — breathes, for the first time in a week.

_"You’re not getting away from me that easily."_

-~-

**19\. Out of Time**

"Shit, my phaser’s dead."

"So’s mine."

"So we’re trapped."

"Pretty thoroughly, I’d say — like pigs in a blanket.  Dammit, avalanche.  Dammit, planet Something-with-an-M Five.  Dammit, Jim."

"It’s not the captain’s fault."

"Oh, but it is, Monty, it always is."

"…"

"Wish I had some whiskey with me."

"I might have some — aha!  My emergency scotch."

"Pass it here, will ya?"

"Where are you?"

"I’ll move — closer, just — oh.  Hello."

"That’s my leg."

"Hello, Monty’s leg — oh, and here’s your hand.  Wow, those are some mighty callouses …"

"It happens, what with all of the machinery I have to fix and, uh, stuff.  Oh, here."

"Thanks."

"…"

"How much time d’ya think we’ve got left?"

"Until the air runs out … Maybe a couple of hours, maybe minutes, I don’t know.  The atmosphere here is less oxygen rich than what we have on Earth."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"…"

"Monty, before we run out of time, can I say …"

"What?"

"I was gonna ask you if you wanted to meet me for coffee, or something.  Y’know.  Before this happened."

"Are you … asking me out, Doc?"

"Maybe …"

"If we get out of this alive, you owe me a pint of scotch."

"Deal."

-~-

**20\. Lies**

There are so many different flavors of lies a person can tell.

There are beginners’ lies that stick in your throat when they go down like a too-strong peppermint, let your mother know that, yeah, you ate that cookie even after she warned you against it.  There are meaningless lies that don’t hurt anyone, but don’t really help either — does a little sugar really help the medicine go down, or does it just dull the flavor, say everything is okay when it won’t?  There are blanket lies, messy generalities, sauces so full of undetermined spices that they mask the poison beneath.  There are sweet lies, smooth like honey, spoiling your taste buds with the fare from an untrustworthy source — stolen from hardworking bees, or dreams too good to be true.  There are necessary lies, caffeinated lies, first mocha then decaf then regular then graduating to espresso, helping you wake up in the morning or finish the last lap of that race with a false promise of what awaits you at the end.

But the worst lies of all are the lies you tell yourself when everything goes wrong — stinging your throat with hard liquor, so disgusting at first but they make you feel better, or at least forget, so you keep drinking and drinking while you can’t recall what it’s like to be sober.

Leonard McCoy is quite familiar with those black lies.  Hell, he could’ve invented them, as he’s practically living off of them.  It started with the divorce — “It isn’t her fault, it’s yours.  You were a terrible husband, you can’t ever try that again." — then carried over to Joanna — “You’re the worst father ever, should just get out of her life now before you completely mess her up." — and escalated with the horrible day he was abruptly promoted to Chief Medical Officer of the Enterprise — “Look at all of these people, dying on your watch, all your fault, you should quit before they fire you."

Leonard isn’t the worst doctor, and he saves people sometimes, that’s true.  But people die, and Joanna doesn’t speak to him for weeks at a time, and he hasn’t had a successful romantic relationship since before the divorce.  Leonard tells himself it’s all his fault, because he thinks the others are too kind to say so to his face.  Even Jim ignores him sometimes, favoring that green-blooded hobgoblin and only coming by the med bay when he needs advice to ignore or has a really, really serious injury.

And then, this silly Scottish man wiggles his way into Leo’s life, with his silly accent and his silly smile.  Monty’s always telling Leo that it’s not his fault, that he’s brilliant and good and worth it. He doesn’t say it out loud, but he wants to spend time with Leo for his own sake, and listens to his stories, and laughs at his jokes, and sometimes, Leo will catch Monty staring at him as though he’s this glowing, wonderful, unattainable thing, and …

Monty is a cold shower for Leo, clean, pure water cascading over him and sobering him up, tearing down the walls and washing away the lies.

It’s refreshing in the best possible way.

-~-

**21\. Melody**

Montgomery Scott is wearing a kilt.

Montgomery Scott is wearing a kilt, singing and dancing to Gaelic music, and drinking Scotch the way a fish drinks water.

Leonard is not yet sure how he feels about this; he can’t decide between horror, amusement, and arousal.

"What the hell?" he asks.  "I mean, a man’s got the right to do whatever he wants in the privacy of his own quarters, but, um …"

Monty pauses the music and explains, “It’s me ship’s and my two-year anniversary."

"Two years since …" Leo does the calculation in his head.  "Since you beamed aboard into that turbine tank and nearly drowned?"

"Aye," Monty says, grinning.  "I already went swimming in the ship’s pool in honor of that, and now I’m practicing my singing so’s I can sing my favorite Scottish love song to her engines later."  He turns the music back on and resumes singing, swaying emotionally.

 _Of_ course _he has a special ritual to celebrate his anniversary of coming to the ship,_ Leo thinks, trying not to feel jealous of the Enterprise (and failing.)  He awkwardly stands and watches for a minute, wondering if he’s even welcome here, but then Monty is pulling him in and making him dance to bagpipes and fiddles, and the scotch is good, and he remembers that Scottish men rarely wear underwear beneath their kilts …

The next time Monty practices his love song, he and Leo slow-dance to it, pressed closer than pre-teens at a middle school dance.  Leo doesn’t understand a single word of the song, but he can feel the sentiment — warm and affectionate, like an old comforter or a chocolate chip cookie.  Monty’s got a nice voice, after he has a few drinks; Leo should persuade him to sing the next time they have ship karaoke night, save them from Jim’s attempts at hard rock, Sulu’s weird, Asian martial arts dancing, Chekov’s Dima Bilan impression.

Or maybe he shouldn’t — maybe he should save this, treasure it, be the only man to hear Scotty sing.

"You know, it’s also the anniversary of when I first met you," Monty whispers as the last strains of fiddle fade away.

Leo will have this melody stuck in his head for the next week, but he doesn’t really mind.***

-~-

**22\. Reflection**

Every planet has its own customs, its own rituals, its own special ways to test strength and bravery.  When a young Chalaganii comes of age, it must pass through the hall of mirrors, staring deep into each one, in order to look past its reflection into its soul.

Before they are worthy of an audience with the king, the landing party from the starship Enterprise must do the same.

Jim has fun with it, because guys.  Guys.  Hall of mirrors.  He hasn’t been in one of these since he was a little kid and Winona took him and Sam to a fun house while she was on shore leave.  It fascinates him to see how the mirrors twist reflections around, stretch them out, make them new — the same people, in so many different shapes and sizes.  The mirrors don’t do much for Jim (except for the one that makes him look fat, which is freaking hilarious), but for Spock, with his stoic, “I don’t understand what the fuck is going on but I dislike it on a spiritual level" expression, they work wonders.

Halfway through, Jim notices that poking fun of Spock is not the only option, here; 500 variations of Bones’ scowl is also a valuable life experience.  There’s big Bones’ scowl, little Bones’ scowl, twisty Bones’ scowl, double Bones’ scowl, tall Bones’ scowl, short Bones’ scowl, upside-down Bones’ scowl (not a smile, just a weirder scowl) …

"What, you don’t like mirrors, Bones?" Jim asks.

"No, I just don’t like what’s inside," Bones replies, scowling still harder.

And then, Jim gets to thinking, and he realizes that, while he loves Bones’ scowl with all of his heart, dreams of it sometimes in a completely platonic, bromantic way, he rarely sees much else. 

 _I’ve gotta fix that,_ he decides, because he likes a challenge — and he spends the rest of the day subtly trying to crack the doctor’s hard shell.  He tells jokes, makes funny faces, goes in for surprise hugs … but nothing works.  He thinks he sees a hint of a grin here or there, but it’s always repressed, afraid to come out and see its own reflection.

When they beam back aboard the Enterprise, Scotty’s in the transporter room, humming to himself and eating a sandwich.  And Jim, who’s been watching Bones’ face all day, still nearly misses the smile that comes across the doctor’s face — small and quiet, but so fond, and there.

Scotty notices it — of course Scotty notices it — and beams back.  Reflected and magnified.

 _Huh,_ Jim thinks.

-~-

**23\. Picking Up the Pieces**

The Starfleet Academy was pretty much annihilated by Nero.  All of the cadets — except the lucky few assigned to the Enterprise — are gone, along with many captains and other officers.  The system has shattered, and it’s left to those remaining to pick up the pieces.

Leonard McCoy finds that, suddenly, he’s one of the highest ranked doctors at the academy.  Which feels great for about two seconds, before he realizes that with recognition comes responsibility.

So Leo has to run labs.  Leo has to evaluate younger doctors.  Leo has to be consulted when ship assignments are made.  Leo has to argue with admirals about giving the medical program a high enough percentage of the budget.  And, of course, Leo has to look after Jim’s crew, because God forbid a single one of the people who helped Jim save the world is out of commission when the Enterprise next sets off.

It seems to Leo that he has to do everything, and he hates it.

So one night, he makes a run down to the Enterprise, to check that the medical supplies he ordered actually made it to the med bay, and he hears something in the hallway.  Dreading thieves or aliens or worse, Leonard goes to investigate and finds a familiar figure toting a mug of coffee to the engineering deck.

"Scotty?  What’re you doing here?"

"Oh, hey, Doc," Scotty replies with an easy grin.  "I could ask you the same question."

"Had to check on some medical supplies," Leo explains.  "Since everything medicinal is suddenly my job, now — I signed up to be a doctor on a ship, not the number one doctor responsible for basically everyone in my department."

"Too much work?" Scotty asks sympathetically.

“That’s an understatement.  I haven’t been done before eleven in weeks.”

"Well, if you want to keep ranting, follow me," Scotty says.  "I’m tweaking some programming with the warp core, and I wouldn’t mind company."

"So this is what you do, then?" Leo wonders, following.  "In your spare time?  Fixing up the Enterprise?"

"Well, she’s a beauty, but she’s been knocked around quite a bit, and I want her in tip-top shape before launch day."

Leo nods, then says, “You’ve got an easy job, though.  You’re just dealing with machines, not people."

"It’s still just picking up pieces," Scotty replies thoughtfully.  "Putting them back together, doing it with enough compassion that they stay put."

Leo stays for hours, laughs more than he has in a long time, and agrees to return the next night.

-~-

**24\. All I Have**

"Why does the Captain call you Bones?" Monty asks one night, looking up from his engineering journal to glance curiously at the doctor.

Leonard is always eager to find a distraction from writing his medical logs, but this question takes him a bit by surprise.

"I guess it goes back to when we first met," he says after a moment of thought, "on the shuttle to Starfleet Academy.  I was freaking out 'cause of my aviophobia --"

"Avio-what?" Monty interrupts.

"Fear of dying in something that flies."

"Why'd you join Starfleet, if you're scared of dying in a ship?"

"Jim asked the same thing," Leo replies.  "And I told him, I had nowhere else to go -- the ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce.  All I had left was my bones.  And the nickname stuck."

"Oh," Monty says, thinking about what Leo must've been like, back then -- so desperate and alone that he went to the place he most feared.  It wasn't a nice thought.

"Why do you call me Bones?" the doctor asks.

"Well, at first, it was 'cause I couldn't pronounce your real name right."  Monty laughs, remembering.  "'Leonard McCoy.'  It sounds so weird.  Not at all like it sounds when you say it."

"I like how you say my name," Leonard protests.

Monty grins and winks.  "I know you do now, love.  But I didn't then.  Well, and for a while, it was because the Captain calls you Bones, and I figured the Captain usually knows what he's doing, or if he doesn't, he always makes it look bloody good.  And then, finally, it was 'cause you're the bones of the ship, you know?  Without you, we'd all probably be dead ten times over."

"You've said that before, yeah," Leonard replies, recalling a bad night a few months before.  "Still don't quite believe you."

"All you had left was your bones," Monty repeats, quietly, shifting on the bed so that he's facing Leo, catching the doctor's face in his hands so that their eyes meet.  "You know that's not true any more, right?  'Cause you've got the whole ship, everyone on it.  And me, love.  You've got me."

"Monty," Leo whispers -- and closes the distance, kisses him tenderly, gratefully, adoringly, as though if this was all he had, it would be enough.

-~-

**25\. Smile**

"Say cheese," Jim exclaims, pointing an object of torture (camera) in the happy couple's direction.

"That's a stupid expression, used by stupid people, to get stupid, fake-happy photos," Leonard complains, scowling.

"So say, 'Dammit, Jim,' or something," Jim replies.  "Whatever makes you happy."

Leo outright glares.

Monty throws his arm around Leo’s shoulders, already a little drunk partly on the best alcohol this side of the galaxy and mostly on happiness, grinning easily as though he's dreamed of this his whole life.  "Aw, c'mon, love," he says.  "Smile.  It's our wedding."

Leo looks at Mr. Montgomery Scott (McCoy), standing there in his best suit, tie loosened, hair slicked back, eyes shining, new ring on his finger.  Perfect, and all his.

"Yeah," he hears himself say, with a quiet wonder, like he can't quite believe this is real.  "It is."

Jim takes the picture.

It'll still be on Leonard’s night table thirty years later.

-~-

**26\. In the Dark**

A shirt falls to the floor.

One shirt, singular.  Starfleet regulation.  Dark blue, and stained with sweat.  Long sleeves, used to being rolled up.

A second shirt follows, this one red.  Then: shoes, socks, pants, boxers.  Like a line of dominoes, each pushed off by the movements of those before it.

The two men on the bed stare at each other in the dim light, uncomfortable in their skins.  They look each other up and down, like what they find, savor every second.

"Well?  What're ya waiting for?"

A line of kisses -- starting off slow.  A quiet gasp -- appreciation.  A tentative rub -- is this okay?  A hand grasping, guiding -- God, yes.  A low-pitched moan -- why didn't we try this sooner?

In the dark, everything is amplified.  Every touch is a novel, every sound a symphony.  Leo and Monty don't need to speak, because they can feel -- because they have known, somewhere deep inside, that this was meant to be from the moment they first met.

And in the dark, with Monty spilling into Leo and both men coming undone for each other, that knowledge is a bond, stronger than any Vulcan mind melding because it's loud and imperfect and human.

"Montgomery Scott, don't you fucking dare stop," Leo gasps -- a starship going into warp drive.

-~-

**27.  Innocence**

A couple of weeks before they're due for take-off, Monty hears a new voice echoing in the corridors of the Enterprise -- a young voice, eager and innocent.  It belongs, he learns a few minutes later, to a wee girl with mousy brown hair falling out of a messy ponytail and eyes like the sky just before a sunrise.  She dashes into the engine control room and skids to a stop, stares at Monty big-eyed and wondering, like a baby deer.

"Hello, lassie," Monty says.  "Who might you be?"

"Joanna!" comes a shout from the corridor, helpfully answering Monty's question.  Leonard rushes in, panting, and continues, "What have I told you about running off?"

"Papa," the girl – Joanna – says, not seeming to have heard him in the slightest, "that man sounds funny."

Leo grins (Monty's never seen this grin before -- it's wide and fond, reserved for one person only.)  "Oh, that's Scotty.  He's from Scotland."

"Scotty from Scotland."  Joanna giggles.

Leo turns to Monty, apologetic, as though he temporarily forgot the other man's presence.  "Sorry, this is my daughter, Joanna.  I'm giving her a tour of the ship -- at least, I _would_ be, if she didn't keep running off."

"I can help with that," Monty offers.  "I know my fine lady better than the back of my own hand, and I'm due for a coffee break, besides."

"That'd be great," Leo says, looking relieved.

So they walk around the ship, explaining what each and every thing in each and every room is (making up stories when they’re not entirely sure) for to this small girl with boundless curiosity.  Leonard smiles, so much more than usual, and laughs at things that would normally make him scowl, and he looks at his daughter like she's the most precious thing in the universe -- Monty wonders how often he gets to see her.

"Do you like Papa?" Joanna asks Monty, while her father escapes the tour for a brief bathroom break.

"I ... I do, yeah," Monty admits, surprising himself with the truth of that statement.

"Good," the girl says.  "Take care of him for me, okay?  He's really sad sometimes, and I want him to be less sad."

"Okay, I'll look after him," Monty promises -- and he finds himself in a sudden hug.

"Thank you."

Monty likes Joanna.  She's spunky and perceptive, but innocent, secure in the belief that she can make the world better -- how Leonard must have been, before he was broken and put back together with pieces missing.

-~-

**28\. A Place to Belong**

Monty wakes up comfortable and lazy, like a teenager on a Saturday morning, with a pressure on his back too heavy to be a blanket.

It's an arm, he realizes – there's an arm across his back, and a face pressed into his shoulder.  And the events of last night come rushing back, and Monty turns – slowly, quietly, so as not to wake the arm's owner – to stare at Leonard's sleeping face.

Leo is smiling, unrestrained, as he rarely does when awake.  Monty wonders what he's dreaming about, hopes it's nice – and, as though answering his question, Leo mumbles, "Monty," and nudges closer, imprinting his face into Monty's chest as though trying to care it there for all of posterity to see.

Monty has never really belonged anywhere: not in his home village – it was too small, too close, too boring for a boy who wanted to build his way to the stars – not at Starfleet Academy – for a place that claimed to train future leaders, it sure was picky about following the rules, and not making your opinions known -- and for sure not on that terrible outpost on that stupid ice planet – the cold and loneliness of that planet froze a man right down to the blood flowing through his veins, and there were no sandwiches there.

But now, Monty is trapped here, in this circle of warmth, until 0700, when he has to get up for his shift at 0730.  But then, he'll make coffee, no milk three sugars, just the way Leo likes it, and kiss him good morning, and all day they'll message each other on their PADDs when nobody's looking.

Montgomery Scott's the chief engineer of a starship, boldly going where no man has gone before.  And he's waking up in the arms of that ship's head doctor.

He has to pinch himself, before relaxing into the embrace and dozing back off, because this seems too good to be true.

Because this is where he belongs.

-~-

**29\. Falling**

Scotty asked Sulu what it was like, once — what it was like to tumble from so far above, crashing toward the planet’s surface like a space shuttle unable to achieve liftoff.  Sulu had told him that it had been relaxing, almost, with so much air around him.  He’d said it felt like flying — well, at least, it did, until he realized that the ground was fast approaching beneath him.

Scotty has always wondered about that — how can falling feel relaxing, of all things?  But now, he thinks he understands.

He left the Enterprise.  His lady, his beauty, his ship.  Left her, because of pride and a man called Jim Kirk.  And with her, staring blankly after him (or, worse, barely even caring that he’s gone), the best crew in the universe.  (The best doctor in the universe.)

Keenser followed.  At first, Scotty believed that it was because Keenser agreed with him, didn’t want those missiles on their Enterprise before they knew what was inside.  But now, Scotty knows better — Keenser is to him what Kirk was to Sulu: someone to fall with him, to make the landing less painful.

Scotty will be okay, as long as he doesn’t think about the landing.

He marches into the first bar he sees, orders ten shots of the strongest stuff they’ve got, tells himself jokes and stories of a land he left long ago.  It’s relaxing, to not have an entire ship of people depending on him to not mess up.   It’s relaxing to forget.

And then, his com buzzes:

_You idiot, you goddamned idiot, why’d you have to go and leave?  Jim needs you, the ship needs you, everyone needs you.  Chekov’s a smart kid, but he can’t run engineering and you know it.  Stick your damn Scottish pride up your ass and apologize, before we get sucked into the never-ending vacuum of space because of you.  Idiot._

Scotty can hear the voice to go along with those words, a Southern drawl rubbing against sandpaper so hard it creates sparks.  And he can see those eyes squinting with purpose, that finger jammed right in his face.

He can see the ground, all right.  He can see every blade of grass, every stone.

He lets his forehead thump dully against the cool steel of the table, like a drum slowing to silence.

-~-

**30\. Game**

"I hate Jim Kirk," Leonard says, not looking away from the screen displaying that very same captain's vital signs.

Scotty's sitting next to the biobed, feeling kind-of useless, a screwdriver in an operating room.  He came here with the intention of persuading Leo to take a break, let someone else have a shift with the captain (it's been twenty hours since they landed, and Leonard hasn't left) but, now, he realizes there's no chance of the doctor leaving, and hopes he can at least provide some kind of moral support, even if it's only in the form of a person to rant to.

"Why?" Scotty asks.

"He acts like this is all a game, that's why," Leonard replies, his voice audibly shaking.  "He thinks he's invincible, like he's still a little kid playing at aliens and spaceships and nothing can get him, not really."

"Isn't that how we all started, though – with a game?" Scotty says, when the conversation seems to trail off.  "I used to play with my dad's old computer, taking it apart and putting it back together to make it run faster.  And Uhura used to go to Central Park and listen to all of the different languages and try to pick up as much as she could, and then pretend she was on a diplomatic mission to those planets and had to negotiate a peace treaty.  And Sulu used to run around pretending he was a spaceship, arms outstretched and flying, and Chekov used plot pretend courses through his dad's old maps of the stars, and Spock ... Spock has never mentioned it, but I'm sure he played with science experiments or something.  Didn't you play doctor once?"

Leonard turns to adjust something on the biobed, doesn't look at Scotty when he says, "No.  Never."

"It was never a game for you?"  It's hard for the engineer to believe.  "How'd you know you wanted to be a doctor, then?"

And now, the doctor turns, stares at Scotty as though daring him to make light of this.  "When I was twelve, my little sister and I were home alone.  I dared her to climb on top of the roof with me.  She fell off.  Broke her arm, fractured her leg, got a concussion."

"Oh," Scotty breathes, trying not to imagine what that must have been like -- a terrified boy, shivering and crying, with no idea what to do.

"People aren't invincible, Scotty.  Someday, Jim Kirk is going to go too far, push too hard, and I won't be able to save him, and I ... I ..."

And he breaks.  He doesn't cry, exactly, but it's worse, somehow -- this man, the rock that holds up a ship, sobbing silently, coming apart at the seams.

Scotty's never pretended to be good with people, but he can tell when a man needs a hug.

"It won't be your fault.  It's not your fault.  It's never your fault," he whispers, and hopes that will be enough.

-~-

**31\. Obsession**

They're walking through London on the way from a meeting with Starfleet command back to their hotel when Monty spots something in a shop window.  He gives an excited shout and rushes in, dragging Leonard along behind him.

When Monty talks to the shop attendant, his accent is as thick as Leonard has ever heard it -- so thick, in fact, that the doctor can only catch a few words, here and there: "Doctor" and "TARDIS" and "DVD."  Strange, since nobody's used DVDs for decades ...

When they walk back outside a good half hour later, Monty is lugging a huge shopping bag, stuffed to the brim with boxed sets.

"What was that all about?" Leo asks.

"Doctor Who!" Monty exclaims, grinning and doing a little happiness jig (as best he can with his arms full.)

"Doctor what?"

"No, not Doctor What, Doctor Who," the engineer explains, as though this answers all of Leo’s questions.  "It's only the best TV show ever made.  I was completely obsessed with it as a kid.  Have you really never heard of it?"

Leo _looks_ at him.

"Terrible shame.  Well, I know what we're doing when we get home ..."

It turns out to be a sci-fi show from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ("longest running sci-fi show of all time, at least on Earth," Monty announces proudly) about an alien who travels through space and time in a blue police box.  Leo complains at first, of course -- the special effects are atrocious, aliens don't look anything like that, how can that man call himself a doctor when he doesn't have any kind of medical degree, etc. – but, slowly, he finds himself enjoying the plots, the suspense, and the Doctor's quirky humor.

More than that, though, Leo finds himself watching Monty.  There's something about re-living one of your favorite experiences from when you were a kid that transforms you into a kid again, wide-eyed and in love with the world.  And Leo has never been in love with the world, but he might just ...

As they finish the Big Bang Two and Monty's practically bouncing up and down with how _clever_ it all was, Leo leans over and kisses him, long and sweet.

"What was that for?  Not that I'm complaining."

"Oh, nothing.  So, what happens next?"

-~-

**32\. Rivalry**

There are times when Scotty resents Captain James Tiberius Perfect-Hair, and not just for his perfect hair (the man can wake up, run his hands through that stupid golden mess, and walk onto the bridge looking like a bloody male model, it isn't fair.)  Jim Kirk is a shooting star, blazing across the galaxy in a streak of light and heat, illuminating everything he touches.

Scotty doesn't know exactly what happened during their time at the Academy, but he can tell by the way Bones talks about Jim, acts around Jim, looks at Jim -- that same mix of hatred and masked affection you use for that dog that pees in your shoes but intrinsically knows when you're sad -- that they taped each other up, the two of them.  Not exactly a full fix, but they closed the gaps enough, hid the cracks enough, making each other laugh when they wanted to cry and believing in each other when nobody else would.

Scotty doesn't know exactly what happened during their time at the Academy, but he's pretty sure they must have fucked at least once, lonely and desperate, determined and wanting.

And then, Jim changed, grew into a man, a starship captain, a leader worthy of respect.  Oh, he doesn't always stay that way -- he falters, sometimes, and sits in the med bay in silence for hours, silently asking for advice that Bones can't give.  But most of the time, he's flying, and he doesn't need Bones -- at least, not the way he used to.

When Jim was broken, he needed a doctor to make him better.  Now that Jim's better, he needs a first officer to make him the best.  He and Spock lead the greatest crew Starfleet's ever seen, and, together, they can take on anything.

Scotty thinks it isn't a rivalry, not really.  How can it be a rivalry if Jim isn't even aware it exists?

Scotty doesn't want to take the place of Jim Kirk in Leonard McCoy's heart.  He doesn't want to be a fellow beaten-down kid sharing a flask of whiskey; he wants to be a rock, holding steady, a foundation for something permanent.

There are times when he thinks he has a good chance -- a long night spent laughing and telling stories, or a shared private joke, or a coaxed-out smile -- but then he'll catch Bones looking wistfully at his captain, muttering, "Damn kid" like there's only one thing he wants in this universe, and Scotty wonders if he has any chance at all.

-~-

**33\. Insanity**

There was a time when they locked a man up for claiming that the Earth was round, and look where we are now.  Shoot for the moon and you'll land among the stars, because the moon is too close – too white, too pockmarked, too tired of being aimed at.  Space is the final frontier, because everywhere else has been tainted – crowded, sat on, painted over in the colors of human.

"Why are we even here?" Monty mumbles one morning when the alarm goes off too early for pleasant existence.

"Because we're fucking insane," Leo replies, promptly rolling over and going back to sleep.

Fucking insane -- those are words that stick.  The Enterprise, Starfleet, the Federation, the universe, they're all fucking insane.  And who are two men, trying to not drown in it all?  What rights do they even have?

Leonard McCoy used to be afraid of space (disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence), and now, he can mostly tolerate it, but it still hits him on occasion -- what is he doing here, on a starship, flying from nowhere to anywhere at speeds faster than he can comprehend?  And Monty is the one who pulls him back from the edge, reminds him that space is crazy and weird in the most wonderful way -- it's worth it.

Montgomery Scott is brilliant, and there's always been a fine line between brilliance and insanity.  He works on the same complex problems for hours, pulls at his hair, bangs his head against the wall, drives himself mad with the fear of being unable to live up to himself.  And Leo is the one who pulls him back from the edge, reminds him that sometimes it's better to be sane and dull than insane and brilliant -- it's worth it.

"Why are we even here?"

Some questions are too big -- too insane -- to even be asked.  But they can be answered, with the smallest of moments.  A million pieces of good intentions can make up a rotten whole, after all. 

Or a million pieces of nonsense can make up a beautiful universe.

Someday, Monty will ask Leo if they could spend the rest of their lives together.  And Leonard will reply that the idea is fucking insane, but he'll go along with it anyway.

Someone once said that flying is throwing yourself to the ground and missing.  And, oh, the human race is awfully good at missing, the crew of the Enterprise even more so.

-~-

**34\. Warmth**

Leonard wakes up, and it's three A.M., and it's cold.

He thought he was okay, after he got back to the ship.  He survived the blizzard -- that planet did its goddamned best to bury him in its ceaseless snow, to drive its ice down beneath his skin, but he resisted, he fought, he won.  He thought he'd be okay.

But he tries to sleep, and he remembers that dark place, in a cave beneath the snowdrifts.  He remembers desperately forcing himself to stay awake because if he failed, he might not be able to get up again ... There's something about being buried that stays with you, suffocates you even when the damage is gone.  And it's so cold -- Leo knows he's on the climate-controlled ship, but his thin blanket isn't nearly enough.

So he gets up, too awake and half alive, and wanders the ship.  The only people up at this hour are the small, necessary crew, and they're all at their stations, so nobody else is in the hallway. 

Leo is a ghost, barefoot, in only an undershirt and boxers.

And then, somehow, he finds himself at a familiar door, and to his exhausted mind, it makes perfect sense.

" _Tuig thus’ an t-eathar, 's tuigidh an t-eathar thu_ ," Leo whispers, remembering the phrase from the tens, hundreds of times he's heard it -- and the door opens to reveal the chief engineer of the Enterprise, sprawled across the bed on his stomach in full uniform, hand-drawn transporter diagrams open across his stomach, snoring softly, radiating warmth like a miniature star.

His gravity pulls Leo in; he barely hesitates before sliding into bed and curling up against the other man's side, like a stray cat seeking shelter after a storm.  This bed is regulation, same as Leo's, but it feels warmer and more comfortable, somehow -- or maybe that's just the man occupying it, the man who now subconsciously slides an arm around Leo, pulls him close, murmurs something incomprehensible into his shoulder.

Leo falls asleep almost immediately.

_You don't know how much I need you._

-~-

**35\. Blind Faith**

Montgomery Scott has never been a religious man.  His mother was too overwhelmed with five kids to ever bring them to church, and his father wasn't around often enough to have any influence at all.  But he went with a friend once, to this tiny, Presbyterian place with faded white walls perfect for echoing hymns, and he likes the idea of religion -- the idea that there's an omnipotent being up there, watching out for you, listening to your prayers and making the big decisions.  He doesn't quite believe in God, but it's comforting to think that someone does.

Leonard McCoy was brought up in the proper Southern tradition: church every Sunday, grace at meals, an old, worn family Bible passed through Father's hands and Mother's words.  He grew up with the memory that faith in God is all you need to get to Heaven and the conviction that God was wise and kind and could fix anything.  But then he became a doctor, and stopped believing, because he's seen too many bad things happen to good people, spent too much time alone in a bar staring at the bottom of an empty glass wondering why.

The thing about being human, though, is that you've got to believe in something.  Otherwise, life will drag you down and tie you to the train tracks, and despair will come barreling down with no chance of stopping.  Hope keeps us alive, and belief keeps us free.

The crew of the starship Enterprise believe in each other.  “I've got your back” isn't just a phrase -- it's a way of life.  They might bicker for hours on end, but when danger strikes, they all trust each other to do their jobs to the best of their abilities and get them out of whatever mess they've been thrown into, and it almost always works.  They aren't a family, they're better than a family, because they chose each other, and their faith isn't blind but based on pure, unquestionable ability.

Montgomery Scott has never been a religious man, but he has faith in his doctor, to weather the storm with a snarky remark and a roll of his eyes, to keep every single man on the ship alive.  And he has faith that, when it's all over, there will be a knock on his door and Leo will appear, tired and maybe a bit proud, and they'll drink (or even just talk) until it's time for the next shift.  And that gives Monty faith in himself, because someone wants him for himself -- not his transwarp theories or his heritage or his dry humor but himself -- and that's better than any omnipotent being, if you ask him.

Leonard McCoy can't believe in a god that allows the amount of shit that exists in the universe, but he has faith in his engineer, to grin in the face of danger, to never give up until the ship is safe.  And he has faith that, when it's all over, he can head over to a certain room and rant about that stupid thing Jim did or that hilarious thing Spock said, and Monty will listen, maybe add in funny side comments here or there, but never scorn.  And that gives Leo faith in himself, because maybe God doesn't do his job all that well, but Monty will always be there when Leo needs him, not because he has to but because he wants to.

Faith isn't given, it's earned.  And the best person to believe in is yourself.

-~-

**36\. Memories**

They are the oldest of the Enterprise's original commanding crew, but they aren't the first to retire.  Leonard goes, not too long after Jim, to keep him from angering the _entire_ admiralty, but Monty stays on starships as long as he can, not caring for promotions as long as he can be the engineer for the best Starfleet has to offer.  But then, one day, he gets a message from his favorite cantankerous old doctor, reading simply, _I'm not getting any younger, you know._

So they move into that house in rural New England, as best a compromise between the South and Scotland as they could get, and Leonard gets calls from Starfleet or Jim or even Spock sometimes, yells that they're all idiots and he's too old for this shit, and Monty writes recruitment letters every so often and keeps up with the latest engineering breakthroughs, but, for the most part, space is gone, for them.  They can still see the stars, but they can't reach them anymore.  All they have left is their memories.

"Hey, remember that time I gave Spock the silent treatment for a whole week and he didn't even notice because he was enjoying it too much?"

"Hey, remember that time Hikaru walked in on us going at it in the med bay and wasn't able to look at either of us in the face for a month?"

"Hey, remember that time Jim drew mustaches on everyone with sharpie when he couldn't sleep during shore leave?"

"Hey, remember that time Spock got really worried that he was gay and Pavel told him, 'It isn't gay if it's on the moon,' and Spock got so confused because he didn't know which moon Pavel was talking about?"

"Hey, remember that time the ship got invaded by tribbles?"

"Hey, remember that time we got kicked off of New Vulcan?"

"Hey, remember that time Nyota and Carol made out in the rec room and then Nyota knocked a guy out for trying to videotape it?"

"Hey, remember that time Jim caught Spock singing about his unrequited love issues?"

"Hey, remember that time I made it rain in engineering?"

"Hey, remember that time we first met?"

They don't talk about the bad times -- not because they want to forget them but because pain isn't worth celebrating, but happiness is.

"Hey, remember that time I first kissed you?" Leonard asks, swinging aimlessly back and forth on one of those old porch swings that will never go out of style, a glass in one hand and a wistful smile on his face.

"'Couse I do, vividly," Monty replies with a grin.  "It was just like ... that."

-~-

**37\. Haze******

Out of all of the terrible things that have happened to Leonard McCoy on away missions, probably the worst of them all was the time he was brainwashed.

It's a strange planet, populated by humans but also, somehow, not -- they're too blank, too accepting, too causeless.  It smells like Communism, only more diabolical, and Leonard doesn't like it. 

And then, they get captured, and these thugs in all brown (not black, black would be too obvious) come and take him away.

He resists it as long as they can, screaming that he's Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer of the USS Enterprise, serial number NCC-1701, Captain James T. Kirk, but it's too powerful, and soon the screams are pushed into a tiny corner of his mind, unreachable – under control.

Leonard returns to the cell with the others, but he isn't Leonard anymore; he's part of a different whole.  The still-living corner of his mind watches, horrified and powerless, as the rest of him speaks of paradise, accuses Jim and Spock of plotting traitorously against Landru, attacks Jim – attacks _Jim_.

He's only thankful that Monty isn't here, because he can forgive himself for Jim, but not ...

Jim and Spock come through, destroy the supercomputer, save the planet, and Leonard's mind is his own again.  He doesn't show it -- he hides carefully how shaken he was by the invasion of his mind -- but Monty can tell, somehow.  Monty can always tell, and he shows up at Leonard's door with a bottle of his home brew, the strongest stuff he saves for special occasions.

They don't say much, don't need to.  Just sit next to each other on the bed, as close as they can get, pass the bottle back and forth

Monty almost lost the ship, that day.  Second in command means he has to run things when Jim and Spock are both gone, and he gets nervous with too much power -- he can command machines, but not people.  And when the ship is being bombarded with heat rays, shields _thisclose_ to splintering -- and then the message comes on top of that, "McCoy's been absorbed" -- Monty had never felt so terrified.

Leonard McCoy and Montgomery Scott have the best kind of relationship, because they understand each other.  And in the morning, when they remember today in a haze of terror, this will be the moment that sticks out clearly -- pressed against each other, they know that it'll be alright.

-~-

**38\. Cold Embrace**

They spend their week of shore leave on a planet famous for its beaches, with white sand so fine it could be flour and waves three times Spock's height half of the day and no taller than Keenser the other half.  At the resort Jim picked out, you can go swimming, kayaking, waterskiing, jetskiing, kitesailing, parasailing ... Anything ocean-related you can imagine, and then some.

Leonard, intelligent human being that he is, chooses to simply lie on the beach.  The ocean is cold, the sun is hot, and he hasn't had a good tan in years.  Spock joins him on the beach, saying something about illogical humans with their unfathomable desire to frolic in dangerous waters, but the Vulcan has an elaborate folding chair and some sort of special parasol thing to protect his delicate skin from the sun while Leonard is sprawled face-down on a huge towel, so it's not like they're getting in each other's space or anything -- both of them can enjoy peace and quiet.

Leonard closes his eyes and listens to the relaxing sound of the waves rushing in and out.  He's in that perfect place between awake and asleep, feeling warm and illuminated, lazy and whole, when something wet and freezing throws itself against his back.

"What the hell?" Leo sputters, abruptly flipping over to find a certain (evil) engineer holding him down in a cold, oceany embrace.

"Thought y'were lookin' a wee bit too comfortable over there, Leo," Monty says, grinning.  And then he's up and running, laughing (at the expression on Leo’s face, no doubt) as he goes.

"Now I'm all wet, you son of a bitch!" the doctor shouts after him.

"That was the idea!"

Well, this cannot simply be allowed to go on.  If Monty gets away with this, then Jim will think it's okay to dangle seaweed in Leo’s face, or Chekov and Sulu will think it's okay to pour buckets of sand over him until he's completely buried, or God knows what else.

"Goddamnit, I'm a doctor, not a sprinter," Leo mutters, picking himself up off of his towel (which is now wet as well -- that asshole) and racing after Monty.  It's a long, arduous chase across the beach, with the entire goddamn bridge crew cheering for one person or the other.  At some point, Monty heads into the ocean, hoping to deter his pursuer, but Leonard is already wet, and revenge is more important, anyway.

Finally, both men collapse in the water, panting, and float on their backs for a minute or two, staring up at the endless purple sky.

"I fucking hate you," Leo says (his hand curled around Monty's wrist -- _don't swim away_.)

"No, you don't, you love me," Monty replies (his hand reaching around to give a squeeze -- _of course I won't_.)

And, well, Leo has no verbal response to that that isn't either extremely cheesy or a lie, so he kisses the stupid, stupid, stupid, amazing Scot instead.

-~-

**39\. My Inspiration**

"I'm thinking about writing a book,” Leonard confesses late one lazy evening, lounging in the engine room while the nurses look after an empty med bay.

“A book?” Monty repeats.  “About what?”

“Us, obviously – the Enterprise,” Leo clarifies when Monty looks at him (surprised and nervous and excited in the best way.)  “I mean, someone’s gotta do it, so’s they don’t get us mixed up in the history books.”

The engineer laughs, thinking about it.  “I can just see them painting the Captain as some sort of noble savior of worlds, and Spock as his forever-loyal right hand man, and you as the stalwart doctor with a heart of gold, and Uhura as feminine, and Chekov as innocent, and … Oh, God, that would be terrible.”

“See what I mean?” Leo agrees.  “Someone’s gotta clarify that we make mistakes just as much as anyone else – we just recover more quickly and gracefully – and that we’re all just messed-up assholes who probably would’ve blown up the galaxy if we were just the tiniest bit different.  Might as well be me.”

“What’re you gonna call it?”

“I was thinking, ‘Dammit, Jim.’"

Monty gasps overdramatically, placing his hand over his heart.  “ _Leonard McCoy_!  You wouldn’t name it after me?”

“How would I name it after you?” Leo asks, more amused than anything else.

“Call it, ‘Beam Me Up, Scotty,’ of course.  I can’t believe I even have to say it out loud.”

“Yes, but Monty, nobody ever actually says that,” Leo argues.  “Isn’t the whole point of me writing this book to dispel misconceptions?”

Monty pouts, crossing his arms like a little boy who was denied an ice-cream cone.  It’s about as resistible as Jim Kirk’s infamous puppy-dog eyes, so Leo grins and says, “Don’t worry, all of the love poems in my private journal are named after you, you idiot."

And, well, _that_ , if nothing else, warrants some hot intercourse.  (Monty was almost done with his repairs, anyway, and it _had_ been over a week since they’d last done it – shameful, really.)

They’re lying in a mess on the floor, much later, when the Scot suddenly shouts, “I’ve got it!”

“Whaaat?” Leo drawls, blinking lazily as he emerges from post-climax bliss – and damn it all if that isn’t the most attractive thing Monty’s ever seen, but he can’t get distracted now, or he’ll lose this brilliant idea.

 So he saves that image for later, and elaborates, “The title for your book.  It should be, ‘Boldly Going Forward, ‘Cause We Can’t Find Reverse.’”

Leo laughs for a good five minutes at the time, but in a couple of decades, that title will be dominating all of the literature headlines.

-~-

**40\. A Promise**

Joanna McCoy doesn’t believe in promises.  Her latest therapist thinks that makes her “pessimistic,” and uses a lot of big words, and asks her to talk about her feelings.  Joanna just thinks it makes her realistic.

After all, none of the people in her life ever keep their promises, do they?  Her parents didn’t, when they got divorced – thought she couldn’t hear them but she could, when they screamed at each other in the dead of night, the slam of the door clearly pronouncing, “The end, period.”  Her friends didn’t, when they said they’d keep in touch after she moved – threw her away like a used tissue, as though the years they spent together didn’t matter at all, and it scares her to think that maybe they didn’t.  Her first boyfriend didn’t, when he swore she would never cry over him – told her with no warning that he was tired of her, acted shocked when she gave him a bloody nose for it.  Her father doesn’t, when he says he’ll call – she knows his job is important and he helps save entire planets, but he’s worth more to her than any solar system, and sometimes, she doesn’t feel like that’s reciprocated.  Her mother doesn’t, when she smiles too widely and chirps too lightly – things should be different this time, with this boyfriend, or this job, or this therapist, or this ploy to improve Joanna’s social life, and they never are.

Joanna is sixteen, and she wants to work with computers, because machines may be dull, but they never lie – never make promises they can’t keep.  She has way more gaming friends online than she does at her high school, and she’s fine with that, even though her mother seems to think it isn’t normal.  She dreams of going into space, not because it’s what her father does, but because she wants to see a universe wider than her own – thinks maybe she’ll fit there.

It’s the summer after Joanna’s sophomore year when her father visits on shore leave, and brings another man with him.  It isn’t Uncle Jim this time (he has years of paperwork to catch up on, apparently), but an engineer with a Scottish accent and a booming laugh.

Joanna’s heard a lot about Scotty, and even met him a couple of times, but this is different, because he and her dad are renting an apartment ( _together_ ) in San Francisco, and want her to stay with them for a month.  It’s a little awkward, at first, but it quickly becomes the best summer of her life, because San Francisco is so huge and exciting compared to the suburb she lives in with her mom, and Scotty is brilliant with computers and can help her hack into literally anything, and her dad may pretend to be annoyed when he’s happy but he never pretends to be happy when he’s sad.

One night, Joanna gets up to go to the bathroom (an evening raid somehow led to a three A.M. quest, what can she say) and hears voices coming from the master bedroom:

“This is really nice, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“This summer – our own place, not so much work to do, having Joanna around, all of that.”

“You just like her because she hangs on your every word.”

“She’s a good kid – she’s smart, and has a good sense of humor, just like her old man.  But that’s not the point.  What I’m saying is … would you want to do this?  Something like this?  When we get old and gray?”

“What, you mean you won’t stay on starships until they have to cart you around in a wheelchair from the engine room to the bridge?”

“No, I won’t.”

“Really?”

“Really.  I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Something in Joanna shifts, and she stands frozen for a moment, thinking _maybe_.

And she tiptoes back into her room, and puts back on her headset, and whispers to her best friend, “Hey, I know this seems random, but … I kind-of, sort-of, really like you, and even though we live, like, two time-zones away, would you, maybe … Be my girlfriend?  In a non-platonic way?”

And when her ears explode with the sounds of, “Holy shit!” and “You really mean that?” and “Yes, oh, my God, YES!” and “We’ll meet up someday, I promise,” she doesn’t immediately think of all of the ways it can go wrong.

-~-

**41\. Solitude**

When Montgomery Scott was a kid, he used to hike alone up into the Scottish moorlands, where nothing could be seen except for hills, sparse bushes, and the odd sheep or two.  He’d take a PADD with the old twentieth and twenty-first century science fiction novels loaded onto it – Foundation and Ender’s Game and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – and read for hours, because the books were brilliant, the howling of the wind didn’t bother him, and nobody would mind terribly if he missed supper.

His parents called him Montgomery (too long, too formal); his teachers called him Scott (too strict, too unattached); the other boys called him Scotty (too teasing to be friendly); the other people in town called him lad (too condescending to be kind).  When he was alone, he didn’t have to be called anything at all.

He can work out any problem if you give him enough time.  He’s an engineer – he takes things apart and puts them back together, fitting one piece into another like the most complex of jigsaw puzzles, no box necessary because he’s got one in his mind.  He just needs to be alone to do it – he needs solitude and quiet, because the universe is huge and wonderful but so _distracting_ , so _loud_ , rendering it impossible to think clearly.

He can’t forgive himself when the Enterprise’s warp core gives out.  He left, and it fell apart.  What does that say about him, his duty to the ship he proclaimed to love?  To the crew he was supposed to protect?  He can’t let it happen again.

So he sits by the engines, the ship silent late at night two weeks before take-off, tinkering and tinkering until his hands bleed, running his fingers across her smooth surfaces like a plea for forgiveness.

And then, there’s a knock on the door, and in steps a man not less broken, but somehow more whole.

“Hey, Monty,” Leonard McCoy says.  “You’ve gotta stop moping around and messing with those parts – I don’t want to open up the med bay before we even leave.  Oh, and I brought my best bourbon.  Good Southern stuff, twenty years old …”

He barges in without waiting to be invited, plops down in an empty seat, starts ranting about the many disadvantages of Starfleet bureaucracy – plows through the walls of Scotty’s (Monty’s) solitude like a battering ram.

The engineer puts down his tools and finds himself laughing, for the first time since he left his ship.

-~-

**42\. Pen and Paper**

Nobody handwrites anything anymore.  It’s the twenty-third century, after all, and they have PADDS and coms, giant touch screens and interactive, three-dimensional displays.  Kids learn to type before they learn to talk, and less notepaper is produced every year.  Handwriting is considered archaic and strange, something only done during power outages or cliché romantic films.

Except, of course, for Montgomery Scott.

Scotty loves handwriting – there’s something about the feel of a pen on a piece of paper that he can’t get out of a stylus on a touch screen.  He prints out huge diagrams of the Enterprise’s many systems and spreads them out across the floor, marking them up with ideas for improvement.  He carries a notepad, and can often be found doodling, anything from spaceships to kittens to the bridge crew as alcoholic beverages.  His room is covered in little slips of paper reminding him to call his mother, or fix that blasted captain’s chair, or eat breakfast.

Leonard makes fun of him for it, of course – what are friends for, if not to tease you about your quirks and love you despite them (or even because of them)?

And then, one day, there’s a note stuck to the door of the med bay at the beginning of alpha shift:

“Hey, Doc, the replicator’s only making decaf coffee today for some reason.  Sorry. :) – your favorite engineer.”

Leo marches into engineering and demands to know why Scotty couldn’t have just sent him a message on his PADD, like a sane person, and Scotty thinks it’s hilarious.

So, over the next couple of weeks, the med bay accumulates notes, all starting, “Hey, Doc,” and signed, “your favorite engineer.”  They range from bad puns (“Did you know that the Captain has three ears?  The right ear, the left ear, and the final front ear,” and, “What does a Klingon frog use to win at hide and seek?  A croaking device,”) to genuine suggestions (“Maybe you should call Joanna today,” and, “Try singing instead of shouting when you’re angry,”) to random questions (“How do you explain colors to a blind person?” and, “Why is colonel spelled colonel?”) to quotations Scotty finds amusing (“‘Clothes really do make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.’ – Mark Twain,” and, “‘But I’m a man!’ ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ – _Some Like it Hot_.”)

And then, when they start dating, Leo starts finding a whole new type of note, these in his quarters instead of the med bay.  “You look good in short sleeves,” and, “I missed you while you were on the away mission,” and, “My room, ten P.M., bring yourself (no clothes necessary).”

He always scowls when he finds a new note, but the nurses know what’s really going on, and they think it’s adorable.

One day, Christine is in the doctor’s room, peeking around a little while she waits for him to find his other shoe so that they can head to their shift together, and she finds a whole drawer of them, smoothed out and stacked neatly.

Just pen and paper, but they mean so much.

-~-

**43\. Teamwork**

Sometimes, when he gets bored on long missions, Captain James T. Kirk likes to play music on the ship’s loudspeakers.  It’s usually rock to keep the crew pumped, but he occasionally tries to “educate” them on the style of old Terran music from the twentieth century, or Spock will hijack the loudspeaker and play classical music, or a message will go around asking for requests.

And then, there are days like today: the day that Jim discovers something called _High School Musical_.

The first time he plays through the soundtrack, it’s not really that bad.  Sure, the lyrics sound like a completely unrealistic, teenage romantic comedy knockoff, but the tunes are catchy, and at least it isn’t opera.  The second time, it starts to get annoying.  By the tenth time, a certain CMO is about ready to rip the captain’s hair out, piece by piece.

_[Stardate 3916, 1706 hours, McCoy to Scott] How many more times do you think we can live through “Getcha Head in the Game?”_

_[1712 hours, Scott to McCoy] Negative ten._

_[1713 hours, McCoy to Scott]  Then how about we get back at our asshole of a captain for suggesting us to this torture?_

_[1716 hours, Scott to McCoy]  Got anything in mind?_

_[1720 hours, McCoy to Scott]  As a matter of fact, I do.  Prepare yourself for brilliance._

And so, it comes to pass that the next day, Jim Kirk walks onto the bridge for Gamma Shift and screeches like a little girl.

Which is actually pretty appropriate, considering his captain’s chair looks like an entire tribe of little girls were allowed to vandalize it on an unlimited budget.  It’s pink, the kind of obnoxious hot pink that is outlawed on twenty-nine planets (including New Vulcan), and decorated with stripes of red and white, pictures of the cast of _High School Musical_ , and the drawings of a few handpicked crew members.  “WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER” is written on the back of the chair in massive letters, outlined in glitter.

The captain of the flagship of Starfleet gapes, shakes his head and laughs, then finally sits down in the chair with a grin that dares his crew to make fun of him.

“Attention, crew of the USS Enterprise: _High School Musical_ is now mandatory viewing for all crew members.  There will be a screening in the rec room during lunch hour today for your convenience.”

Within the month, they all find themselves shouting, “What team?” “WILDCATS!”, humming the songs while they work, comparing themselves to different characters, and laughing at the expressions on the faces of people who call the Enterprise and see the chair.

And then, of course, there comes a day when a stuffy, old admiral strictly informs Jim Kirk that if he doesn’t remove the chair and replace it with something more “professional,” his captaincy will be taken away, on the grounds that “six-year-old girls cannot be officers in Starfleet.”

He mourns the chair for a week.

“You’re a genius, Leo,” Monty says.  (He’s lurking in the med bay, waiting for the doctor to finish his records.)

“Well, you must be credited for organizing the refitting of the chair,” Leonard replies, grinning.  “But yes, I _am_ a genius.”

“Give Kirk something stupid and hilarious, watch him get attached to it, and then watch him get depressed when it’s taken away.  Brilliant.  Of course, you have to admit that somehow, in the process, we all got sort-of attached to that movie,” Monty adds thoughtfully.

Leonard scoffs.  “Not me."

“Oh, really?”  The engineer edges closer, leans over and sings directly into the doctor’s ear: “ _We’re soaring, flying.  There’s not a star in heaven that we can’t reach_.”

Leonard kisses him, if only to shut him up.

(This is starting to become a pattern.)

(Oh well, it could be worse.)

-~-

**44\. Drowning**

Leonard McCoy is a functioning alcoholic, mostly because he has to be.

(The night Jocelyn told him she was getting a divorce, he slammed the front door and drove, sat down at the first bar he found and ordered a whole bottle of their strongest whiskey, yelled at the pretty young things who came up to him, touching his arm softly and asking if he was okay.)

He hates the phrase “drowning your sorrows” because it’s false – pretends that the sorrows are drowning, dying, done, when in reality, they’ll be back full-force in the morning.  It’s him that’s drowning, in a sea of _you were never around_ and _you should have fucking said something_ and _I didn’t know_.

(He tries not to get drunk on their anniversary, on Joanna’s birthday, on _her_ birthday, on any day that used to be special, but he fails, always fails, goes back to the one friend that will never judge him or abandon him.)

He works on a starship with over four hundred people on it – tries to save them, mostly succeeds, sometimes fails.  Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence, and it takes their bodies, it takes their minds, it drowns anyone so unfortunate as to be left behind.

(The nurses know to leave him alone when he loses someone, because he’ll scream and he’ll throw things, or he’ll sit quietly with his head in his hands, or he’ll just shake for a minute and go back to business as usual, and they don’t know which is worse.)

Montgomery Scott is a functioning alcoholic, mostly because he likes it – likes the way his mind slurs thoughts and ideas together, making connections he never could while sober – likes the challenge of keeping a clear head as long as possible – likes the burn of good, hard alcohol as it dives down his throat.

(He tells Leonard once, when he’s on the verge of collapse, that he isn’t useless, and that thought stays with Leonard – he keeps it in his mind like an old photo, takes it out when he’s feeling sad, looks at it and smiles to himself, finds the will to keep going.)

Montgomery and Leonard drink together, after missions gone wrong and missions gone perfectly, after weddings and after funerals.  Sometimes they talk, sometimes they don’t.  A line is stumbled across, and then they go back to one man’s quarters or the other’s, and make good use of a bed – either actively or by just resting in the dark, taking comfort in the presence of someone who understands.

(It isn’t that Monty is a lifeboat for Leo – it’s more that he shouts at Leo to stand up, and Leo discovers that the water he was drowning in was only knee-deep the whole time.)

-~-

**45\. Last Hope**

_“Why do you want to join Starfleet?”_

It’s the last question on the recruitment form – the last, and, for some, the most difficult.  You can write anywhere from a sentence to a page (more freedom than you’re given on any other question) as long as your response is valid.

Thousands of wild-eyed cadets scrawl paragraphs of their love of exploration, their desire to see the stars, their dreams of helping species across the galaxy, boldly going where no man has gone before.  Spock writes a mathematical-style proof explaining why, for him, Starfleet is the most logical choice.  Jim Kirk simply writes, “Pike dared me to.”

Leonard McCoy stares at the question for a few minutes – puts it down, takes a walk, takes a shower, looks at it again, puts his head down on the table, picks it up, sighs, and finally writes: “It’s my last hope.”

Montgomery Scott thinks about it for a moment, then writes, “I want a starship of my own.”

By some strange coincidence, the same admissions officer reads both Monty’s and Leo’s forms.  At Monty’s, she laughs, thinking that at least he’s honest – and if he loves the ships that much, he’ll make a good engineer.  At Leo’s, she wonders sadly what might have happened to this poor doctor – and then remembers a different form she read, years ago, and hopes that they’ll be assigned to the same ship, because maybe that first man will be able to find room in his heart for more than just his ship.

They get the forms back as souvenirs when they retire.

Leo reads Monty’s, comments that, wow, he was in love with his job before he even started it.  Monty reads Leo’s, doesn’t say anything, just pulls him in and kisses him, makes sure the hopeless feeling is completely gone.

-~-

**46\. Triangle**

It’s during their third year out that Scotty starts to notice.

“You know, you, the captain, and Spock, have this sort of a … Thing,” he says one night in Leo’s room, while they’re half-drunk on a new batch of his homemade brew (had to test it out somehow, didn’t he?)

“What d’you mean?” Leo asks, a bit confused.

“A thing,” Scotty repeats, drawing a shape in the air as though that explains everything.

The conversation turns to other topics, Scotty’s observation momentarily forgotten until, the next morning, Leo finds a note on his mirror – a drawing of a triangle, each of the vertices labeled “soul,” “mind,” and “heart,” with “that thing” scrawled beneath it.

He’s a doctor, supposed to have good logical reasoning skills, so he tries to figure it out.

And he starts to notice, too: he notices the way the three of them stride around the ship (or a new planet, or a Starfleet base, or anywhere), with Jim at the front and Leonard and Spock following behind; he notices the way they turn to each other for advice, each acknowledging the others’ expertise; he notices the way they banter, friendly and easy, turning “green-blooded hobgoblin” and “cantankerous old doctor” and “my two favorite assholes” into terms of endearment; he notices the way everyone on the ship looks up to them, expects them to solve any problem, get through any situation (and why not, they’ve made it so far.)

Kirk, Spock, McCoy.  Captain, First Officer, Ship’s Doctor.  Heart, Mind, Soul.  Put them together and you’d get the perfect man.

It occurs to Leo that Monty might be feeling a little jealous.

That afternoon, there’s a note taped to Monty’s desk in the engineering room: the same triangle (heart, mind, soul), with a line running through it from top to bottom, labeled “spine.”  When Monty picks it up, he finds words on the back:

_The triangle might be the strongest shape, but a body needs a spine to hold everything together.  And besides, Jim and Spock are the two biggest assholes this side of the galaxy.  You’re only an asshole sometimes._

-~-

**47\. Hold My Hand**

The first time they hold hands, they don’t really think about it.

It’s their first date (well, their first _real_ date, not counting the unofficial drinking and ranting sessions that had been the same as before, only with bonus making out), on brief leave at a conference they’re attending on some planet with a name impossible for anyone except Uhura to pronounce.  And they’re walking out of the restaurant where they ate dinner, heading back to the conference for a panel on Federation-Klingon relations, and Leo is laughing at something Monty said and Monty just grabs his hand.  Leo doesn’t skip a beat – only grips back, those legendary hands so glad to have something to hold on to.

It’s easy.  Natural.  As though they’ve been doing it their whole lives.

What is a hand, anyway?  A body part, same as a toe or an eye, just a collection of cells put together in the right order, but dexterous, nimble – five fingers one thumb, evolved from millennia of nature’s trial and error.  The possibilities for what a hand can do are infinite, but as for what it wants … that’s singular.

Leo loves The Beatles sometimes, when he’s working late or singing in the shower.  They’re old but classic, and their songs are so simple, powerful emotions plain and clear.

Monty catches him humming the band’s best love ballad (you know the one) and laughs, grabs his hand, pulls him up out of his chair, kisses him slowly and with feeling just because he _can_.

It’s easy.  Natural.  As though they’ve been doing it their whole lives.

It’s their retirement, their pensions are huge, their ranks are more than respectable – they can do whatever the hell they want, who cares if they look like stereotypical old geezers in love.  So they take walks in the dusk on remote country lanes, ambling along, talking a mile a minute or not at all, hands holding them together.

The last time they hold hands, they don’t really think about it.

-~-

**48\. Stars**

During their fifth Earth leave, they buy the house.  It’s a sprawling mansion on a hundred acres, with giant windows and a wraparound porch with a proper porch swing, like something out of a Civil War-era novel, out in the middle of the countryside, reachable only through back roads and dirt lanes.  (The crew all complained about getting lost on the way there, but Leo only grinned and said that the best homes are hard to find.)

They had a little housewarming party, with whiskey and poker and chess and Truth or Dare, sitting out on the porch and fighting over who got the swing.  But now, everyone’s gone inside, divided up into the many guest bedrooms, and only Leo and Monty are left – well, Leo, Monty, an almost-empty bottle, and the stars.

“I missed this view, when I was in San Francisco, and up in space,” Leo says, his words shooting into the twilight and leaving a trail of wonder, like a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

“You missed the stars, when you were flying among them?” Monty replies, skeptical.

Leo leans over, grabs the bottle, takes a swig, then explains, “You can’t see ‘em in my med bay.  Not like this, all spread out, long long ago and far far away.  I never wanted to join Starfleet, you know.  Not like the rest of you.”

“’Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence,’ you said,” Monty quotes, remembering.  “But I think you learned to love it, otherwise you would’ve quit years ago.”

“Okay,” Leo admits, “I guess it is kind-of cool to look up at the night sky and know that I’ve been over there and over there and nearly got killed over there and had sex over there …” He points all over the galaxy, to big stars and little stars, constellations and clusters, bright orbs and faint pinpricks.

“Kind-of cool?  Only _kind-of_ cool?” Monty asks.  “On behalf of the cosmos, I feel a bit insulted, love.”

“Oh, well, maybe more than _kind-of_ …”

And then, somehow, they’re kissing, bodies tangling together like the sunset and the horizon, and maybe they’re imagining it or maybe the stars shine a little brighter because they _remember_.  Once upon a time, two boys lay on their backs in the grass on two different sides of an ocean, wondering what was up there and wishing they could discover it for themselves.  Every little kid has an astronaut phase, whether they’ll admit it later or not.

“The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  Why does it have to be one or the other?  Can’t it be both?

The stars aren’t just great balls of gas, suspended in space millions of light years away.  They call.  They search.  They bring.  They remember.  They long to be explored.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” Monty murmurs into the hollow of Leo’s neck.  Leo laughs and looks up, humming the rest of the melody under his breath.

-~-

**49\. Under the Rain**

It’s pouring.

Spock has never really understood the “raining cats and dogs expression;” if he had to compare the current weather pattern to a particular species, he would state that it is raining elephants, or perhaps whales.  Of course, it is illogical for him to be considering such metaphors in the first place, as his logical brain is ill-suited for the task.  (Clearly, he’s the most logical member of the landing party – he’s the only one who brought an umbrella.)

Spock, McCoy, and Scott were supposed to simply beam down and meet with the leaders of the Federation settlement on the planet for a check-up, but there was a slight transporter malfunction, and now, they’re five miles away from the settlement, under this never-ending flood that a more dramatic person might say was out to drown every living creature on the continent.  Spock allows himself a mental sigh at the inconvenience this delay is causing and the unprofessional behavior of his crewmates.

Honestly, he’s tempted to file a complaint, accusing these men of unstable mental health.  Mr. Scott, the chief engineering officer, is actually dancing in the rain, flailing his arms and jumping about in a strange manner with an obscene grin on his face.  Not only is this activity a complete waste of energy, the engineer is also ruining his uniform, instead of standing still in a more sheltered area.  Spock fails to see the appeal.

Doctor McCoy must think differently, though, because he soon joins Mr. Scott in an odd dance, laughing loudly for an unfathomable reason.  Normally, Spock respects the doctor – although they argue frequently, McCoy is not prone to rash, illogical decisions the same way the captain is, and his opinion can be quite valuable in some situations.  But this … The doctor and the engineer are dancing in the rain, acting like young, innocent children.  There is no explanation.

There must be an explanation.  Spock examines more closely.

Scott is closing his eyes and tilting his head up to catch the raindrops on his tongue – McCoy appears fascinated with the movement of his throat as he swallows.  McCoy hums a melody that Spock does not recognize – Scott smiles widely and begins to sing.  Their hands brush together for a brief moment – both of them pretend nothing of significance occurred, but their fingers are shaking.  They glance at each other from time to time, eyes shining like suns, illuminating this cloudy, drenched landscape.

Spock recognizes those looks.  He knows them, all too well.

He calculates a 93.6% chance that the doctor and the engineer are in love, and a 57.8% chance that at least one of them is aware of the fact.

-~-

**50\. Precious Treasure**

There’s a knock on Montgomery Scott’s door at 2330 hours one Thursday night.

The engineer opens it to find Leonard McCoy shifting from foot to foot with a half-smile on his face and a bottle of scotch dangling from one hand.

“You remembered,” Monty says.  (Something rises in his chest and quivers, like a thin tree on a windy day.)

“‘Course I did,” Leo replies.  “A doctor never forgets.  So can I come in, or what

Monty stumbles backwards into the room, Leo following.  They both sit on the bed, open the bottle, start talking the same way they always have – but it’s different, this time.  The colors of this picture are tinged with nervousness and anticipation.

And then, Monty says something – he’ll never be able to remember what he said afterwards, only that Leo was laughing, head tipped back, eyes closed, whole body shaking (the kind of laugh he would never let out in public.)

The engineer had no choice, really.

Right from the beginning, Leo loves the way Monty kisses – for a man used to dealing with machines, he’s surprisingly gentle, as though Leo is some sort of precious treasure – not the sort you lock in a vault and keep hidden for a thousand years or the sort you parade on display for packs of tourists to photograph, but the sort you just savor as long as you can when you see it, the sort that’s rare and beautiful, like a sunrise or a rainbow.

“Was that okay?”

“Better than okay.  Now shut your trap, because it needs to happen again.  Right now.”

“Greedy, greedy – _mmph_.”

**Author's Note:**

> *translation: “Good morning! I won, right? Do you need medicine for your heads?”  
> **sort-of based off of the TOS episode Trouble with Tribbles  
> ***The song I have in mind for what Monty sings is An Eala Bhan, The White Swan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qWWgntTdO0  
> ****based off of the TOS episode Revenge of the Archons

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [sleeping sickness.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127617) by [doohans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doohans/pseuds/doohans)




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